Loss of Legacy

A NOTE ABOUT TODAYS POST: If you have spent any time here, you know that the issue of perinatal grief is one near and dear to my heart. I have spent time reminding people that days like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be painful reminders of children no longer living. However the topic has always been addressed from my perspective as a mother. As we approach Father’s Day and a Father’s Day that this year will be overly filled with grief I have asked my husband, Collin Freeman to share his perspective as a bereaved father. I am deeply appreciative of these reflections of his heart.

Grief over the loss of a child is at best a very hard subject to discuss. When it is your own child, the difficulty is immensely magnified. My wife is an ordained Christian clergywoman and a hospital chaplain. She has been taught to deal with death, and yet all of that teaching and experience goes out the window when it is you who suffers the loss. I sense there is an understanding within the community of caring for grieving parents that says, “Men handle these types of losses differently than women”. I cannot speak to that line of thought. I am at best an amateur in perinatal grieving. What I can do is share with you what the loss of our unborn child was for me from my personal experience, and perhaps give some insight as to what husbands/fathers think and feel during that horrific time of discovering the birth of your child will not happen.

I remember not long after having experienced this tragedy in our own lives, my wife and I attended a small Christian music concert in which the musical artist and his wife also had a similar experience. He said, “Nothing in life ever prepares you for that”, and he was so right. Even when a baby dies in utero, the loss and heartbreak is shocking. You least expect anything to go wrong during the process of life being created. To have that blooming life end suddenly during that development time hit me like a brick wall at 90 mph. The “why” and “how” questions are inescapable when you first hear the news, and I imagine can often stay with a parent for years. In our case, we searched out those questions early but found no answers. There was no health, exposure, or genetic component that could be found that caused our little one’s body to become so deformed and incompatible with anything resembling healthy development. Had we found an answer, however, it would not have changed the result. Our family would not be the same from that moment on, because one of us would never make it into this world. There are families who find some solace in having another child (or more) later in life. For us, that was not to be the case. We tried to conceive again, but to no avail. So we became and remain a family of three. It continues to amaze me how long it took for us to conceive our first child, a girl, and how perfect she has been, from the womb to now. A parent could not ask for a better child than our daughter. And then, the second time we tried to conceive, it occurred within a couple months instead of a couple years, and yet that potential future child had such incredible physical development complications unsustainable for life in utero.

So what can I say to all of this?  How did I, a man, deal with it all?  Not entirely well, as one could imagine. The news came abruptly, and we did not have a large amount of time to process it all and make decisions. I felt I needed to be supportive of my wife who was understandably distraught beyond belief. We stayed close to each other, hugged each other, and did what I imagine God intended when the concept of husband and wife was first introduced into this world: we supported each other. The discipline of proximity and space can be very helpful. Just knowing you are not alone in these situations is a comfort, even if it is a small one. The shock of what we were hearing removed some of the sorrow for me, as the whole concept of not even having another healthy child in our lives was so inconceivable to me at that point. We had made plans. Men often do, and my wife is also a big planner. We were going to be a family of four. Adding another life to your family is a big, life-changing plan. Now to have the plan totally torn up and thrown away was staggering, to say the least. Because of that initial shock, a good portion of my grief spilled over in later days as it wore off. I have found in my grieving that delayed grief is more the norm, at least for me. It has typically been days or weeks later that a huge swelling of sorrow bubbles up and spills over to the point of breaking down. Perhaps this is a built in response for men to have such a large expenditure of emotion well after the fact rather than when it first occurs. So I say, watch your fathers in the days and weeks after the tragic event – they may seem to be doing fairly well initially, but the tremendous outpouring of sadness is going to come.

We also had the unpleasant task of telling our daughter that she would not be getting that new baby brother or baby sister anytime soon. She was not yet 3 years old at the time, but we explained it fairly simply and she understood as only 2-year olds can. I say “we”, but actually my wife was the one who did most of the talking. It was a necessary, unpleasant task, but we got through it. Is finding the right words to say to another loved one easier for a woman?  I am not sure, but when that other person is a chaplain, it is probably at least a shade easier for her/him. I do recommend getting advice from a counselor or chaplain in how to approach this difficult subject with the children in the family, and perhaps even have them physically present in the background as moral support for the difficult task of trying to explain what has happened.

One thing I can say as a man that might have more of an impact on the death of a child at any age is the gender of that child. For some men, the loss of “Daddy’s little girl” could be earth shattering. For other men, the loss of a son who would carry on the family name might be very hard to come to terms with. For me, the latter was the case. As I mentioned before, we have a lovely, smart, perfect daughter. I have a sister; she is married with two lovely young women. For me, it could very well mean the end of the family line of my name when I die. It is neither a big nor a small thing to consider, but even in these modern days, men might feel a certain responsibility to make sure their family name is proudly carried on into future generations. When that no longer becomes a likely reality, another kind of loss can also be felt on the part of the husband/father. We do not know what the gender of our unborn child would have been. If we had found out, and it had been a girl (as our daughter would have preferred), I would have been as equally devastated.

It is my hope that these reflections have given you some thought as to what men (or at least one man’s) experience could be when faced with the loss of a born or unborn child. It is something no parent ever wants to face. For me, the best solace I could find was in the support of friends and loved ones, be they spouse, relatives, pastors, friends, co-workers, or even someone not well known to you. In fact, one of the best pieces of comfort that came to me during that time was in a Facebook post from a long-time friend of mine who I seldom see any more but just happens to be a self-proclaimed agnostic. God did not create just you. God created us. There is no “I” in “Team”, and there is no “you” in suffering the loss of a loved one.

Collin Freeman is a health care professional and husband to Joy Freeman, blogger here at Chaplainhood.  He is father to one 8 year old daughter and a child, Hope, up in heaven.